My congratulations and thanks to all the Dawn people out there. Well done.:-)

I’m sure the Bad Astronomer and Emily Lakdawalla’s Planetary Society blog will have more on this topic soon but I just wanted to let y’all know and break this news for those who haven’t already heard. Hope that’s okay, BA.

* Indeed Vesta is the only asteroid visible to unaided human eyes and is the third largest world in that asteroidal zone of our solar system behind only Ceres and Pallas.

My wife and I were able, magically, to make it to the last shuttle launch, all the way from Hawaii. It was quite the sight to see, heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time. A terrific place to propose.

But I did come away from the launch feeling that the golden age of my country is over; and has been for quite some time.

I,m getting off topic: An important Astronomy tool is 100 years old ,It’s the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.Made by Astronomers Ejinar Hertzsprung and Henry Russell, it plots stars by luminosity and surface temperatue and can be found in most Astronomy books .Also its an improtant educational guide about the stars it is to Astronomy what the Periodic table is to Chemistry.The magizen Scientific American has a H.R. Diagram poster.

Full-spectrum emotions on that day! All we can do now is hope Congress doesn’t destroy what’s left – and watch for exciting developments at the intersection of NASA and private enterprise. Elon Musk says his rockets can take payloads to Mars in 5 years or so. And there’s Branson and Bezos and Bigelow and Boeing and Orbital and others…

We come from star dust and return to star dust or, more poetically perhaps, “The wheel is turning and you can’t slow it down. You can’t let go and you can’t hold on. Every time that wheel turns round, you’re bound to cover just a little more ground.”

We’ve stuck our toes in the sea of space. Now it’s time to go swimming,,,

I do remain cautiously optimistic — it’s my nature — and I will await all atingle to see if private enterprise really does fill in the void NASA will be leaving.

I just worry, sometimes — as it seems that most corporations nowadays aren’t interested if they won’t see profit in as little as three years, and though I think space will be profitable, I think it will take a mite longer than that.

Still, hope abounds. You put a very good video, a very good proposal, and keep teaching people while making them laugh. I can think of fewer higher callings.

LOL…no. My wife hadn’t told me she was trying for the Shuttle lottery, and we hadn’t planned a trip at all this year. She managed to snag them at 3;15am, and woke me telling me we were going. Everything seems magical at three in the morning.